It's often said that cultural shifts only become clearly evident with hindsight. Is it possible that the post-fossil fuel era has already begun?

Indeed, for all the talk of insurmountable challenges and very real crises‐both ecological and economic in nature—there are also promising signs of a shift in how our global culture operates. From young people waiting longer to drive through teens building tiny, mortgage-free houses to the trend toward dematerialization and collaborative consumption, we've documented some of the early symptoms of what might just be a paradigm shift.

Add to that the fact that some serious business types are questioning the fundamentals of growth-at-all-costs economics, and people everywhere are beginning to ponder the notion of a plenitude economy where quality-of-life matters more than GDP, and you really can make the case that we are witnessing something profound.

The number of dormice in the UK – described as one of the country’s “most endearing woodland mammals” – has fallen by more than 70 per cent in just two decades and they are now at risk of extinction, researchers have warned. The hazel dormouse, the only kind native to Britain, is a protected species and efforts are already underway to boost its numbers. However a survey of 26,000 nest boxes in 400 forests found that its population fell by 72 per cent between 1993 and 2014.

Hauliers claim that trucks are overpaying in taxes and charges compared to their impact on the environment and society. But the reality is that road transport is now Europe’s biggest climate problem, writes Samuel Kenny.

The sounds of the natural world are being overwhelmed by the blare of human activity, even in protected wildlife areas, new research has revealed.

The racket is not only harming people’s enjoyment of natural havens, which are known to have significant benefits for both physical and mental health, but it is also affecting wildlife, with animals less able to escape predators and birds less able to find mates.

Scientists used over one million hours of sound recordings from 492 locations in protected areas in the US to calculate that in about two-thirds of places, the noise pollution from human activities was double the background sound levels. A fifth of the protected areas suffered human noise levels that were 10 times background levels, the researchers found.

Salt samples from 8 different countries revealed the presence of plastic contaminants from ocean pollution.

... Once plastic's short use for our needs is complete, we allow ourselves to let 13 million metric tons of the stuff find its way into the oceans each year. According to a 2014 study, there are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the sea, 92 percent of which are microplastics less than five millimeters (0.2 inches) in size.

Over the course of their existence, these remarkable birds have evolved numerous incredible adaptions that allow them to thrive in some of the world's most challenging marine environments. They can drink seawater, survive in temperatures as low -60°C (-76°F), and they are amazingly agile swimmers. Many can swim faster than we can run.

But they are also under threat. While the penguins are heavily adapted for their environments, it has taken them millions of years to evolve these features, and human impact is hitting the penguins' environments too hard and too fast for them to cope. This is why over half of the world's penguins are now in real danger of going extinct.

OVER the past three decades the area of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen by more than half and its volume has plummeted by three-quarters. So says a report “Snow, Water, Ice, Permafrost in the Arctic” (SWIPA), produced under the auspices of the Arctic Council, a scientific-policy club for the eight countries with territory in the Arctic Circle, as well as observers including China and India.

... now it is time to look around at the countryside and wilderness we are so lucky to have – often just an hour away – and start making changes to ensure it will not soon disappear. It has been a long time since anyone wrote poems like Wordsworth, but his words are still there for us to read. They are a reminder to us that sticking up for Nature is surely a moral duty. After all, if we do not clean up our messes, who will?

MOST scientific research follows a logical progression, with one experiment following up on the findings of another. Every now and then, however, serendipity plays a part. Such is the case with a paper just published in Current Biology, which reveals to the world a moth that is capable of chewing up plastic.

Many people in the West have never even heard of the pangolin, yet this “scaly anteater” is the source of a billion-dollar criminal industry that threatens to push it to extinction. BBC Future met a team of Hong Kong’s ecologists and activists trying to save these creatures from extinction.

"WWF looked at the threats to species that are already protected under the Convention on the International Trades in Endangered Species (Cites). The authors found that these threatened animals and plants are poached or illegally harvested in 45% of natural World Heritage sites."

The food waste debate has gone mainstream. People at every level from individual consumers to national governments are beginning to pay attention to the issues which lead to a third of food produced for human consumption being wasted every year. However, there is one side to the story that is often overlooked: the impact of food waste in the Global South.

A wolf pack is roaming wild in Denmark for the first time in more than 200 years after a young female wolf journeyed 500km from Germany.

Male wolves have been seen in Denmark since 2012 and the new female could produce cubs this spring in farmland in west Jutland after two wolves were filmed together last autumn.

It is further evidence that the wolf is returning to well-peopled landscapes after centuries of persecution, with wolf packs also re-establishing themselves in France and Germany and individuals sighted in Holland and even Luxembourg. Before the new population, Denmark’s last wolf was killed in 1813.

Warming temperatures have rapidly reduced the size of 39 named glaciers in Montana since 1966, according to comparisons released by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and Portland State University. Some have lost as much as 85% of their expanse over the past 50 years, with Glacier national park, site of 37 of the surveyed glaciers, set to lose all of its eponymous ice formations within the next few decades. Of the 150 glaciers that existed in the park in the late 19th century, only 26 remain.

The animal, called Lulu, was found dead on the Isle of Tiree in Scotland last year after becoming entangled in fishing lines. But tests now reveal her body contained among the highest levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, ever recorded. The chemicals were banned from the 1970s but are still in the environment.

In the 1990s researchers in Spain, Australia and Central America discovered that amphibians in rainforests and mountain lakes were dying in increasingly large numbers. The killer, it turned out, was chytridiomycosis, a disease caused by the hitherto unknown fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which has since been found around the world.

Biologists were stumped and wondered whether something so sudden and so widespread could be the result of human action. It turns out that they were right, providing further proof that we’re truly living in the Anthropocene.

THOSE who doubt the power of human beings to change Earth’s climate should look to the Arctic, and shiver. There is no need to pore over records of temperatures and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations. The process is starkly visible in the shrinkage of the ice that covers the Arctic ocean. In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by three-quarters. On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer by 2040.

Roadside verges are becoming the last refuge for some of the the rarest wild flowers and plants in the UK, according to a conservation charity.

Plantlife is calling for better management of grassy verges to preserve a wealth of different flowering plants. It says road margins are a haven for wild plants that have been lost from the countryside.

For the first time ever, wind farms in the UK are now providing more energy than burning coal, and not just by a fraction either.

... In fact, coal-fuelled production plummeted to only 9.2% in 2016, down a huge 13.4% from 22.6% in 2015. And let’s not forget that in 2014, a huge 30% of Britain’s energy was still sourced from coal.

"After 25 years of collecting land farmers no longer wanted, the husband and wife now play host to elephants, monkeys and creatures of all stripes. While in all too many places on the planet we’re bearing witness to distressing levels of habitat destruction, it’s beyond heartening to know that in a very special spot in India, the scene is happening in reverse."

North Dakota has seen significant losses of its CRP acres — a program where the federal government leases tracts of privately owned farmland to be repurposed into conservation acres, thus trying to create incentives for preserving ecosystems. Not only does single-crop agriculture bring in more money than CRP during market booms, but the last Farm Bill also capped the number of CRP acres at 24 million acres nationwide.

“Losing CRP or lowering the cap will reduce the amount of habitat for grassland birds or other species,” said Larry Igl, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, N.D. “It’s the equivalent to removing grass from the landscape.”

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